Show Description

GENET PORNO is based on Jean Genet’s 1943 novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, deemed pornographic when first published for its explicit homosexuality and depraved criminality, and follows the loves and betrayals of a cross-dressing gay prostitute named Divine. In GENET PORNO, the ‘impossible ballet’ of Divine’s story is staged within, and transformed by, the production of a present-day gay porn video, incorporating narrative elements from the confessional videoblog of real-life porn star, Damon Dogg. Their stories merge as GENET PORNO explores our contemporary culture of narcissism, our relationship to pornography, and the consequences that result from blurring the lines between our public and private lives.

Video

Artist Bio

Yvan Greenberg founded Laboratory Theater in 2001 and has directed the ensemble in eleven original pieces. His work has been presented in New York by PS 122, The Brick Theater, Dixon Place, The Tank, HERE Arts Center, chashama, New Dramatists, The Performing Garage, The Knitting Factory, and Movement Research, among others. Greenberg received a MacDowell Fellowship in 2006. In 2007, Laboratory Theater helped Dixon Place initiate and establish their on-going artist residency program. In addition to his work with Laboratory Theater, he has directed Una Corda, a solo performance ritual written & performed by Austin-based artist kt shorb, (premiered September 2010 at Blue Theater in Austin, Texas) and Murphy, an experimental music-theater piece by composer Corey Dargel and playwright Honor Molloy, (awarded the New Dramatists’ 2007 Frederick Loewe Award in Musical Theater). Greenberg has choreographed two other pieces by Dargel, Thirteen Near-Death Experiences (PS 122, NYC, 2009), and Removable Parts (HERE Arts Center, NYC, 2008), directed by Emma Griffin. He has recently collaborated with composer Eve Beglarian on The Sirens, or Pleasure as part of her RiverProject at Abrons Art Center, NYC in January 2012.

Laboratory Theater is a Brooklyn-based experimental theater ensemble dedicated to the creation of original, interdisciplinary work. Under the vision and direction of Greenberg, the company creates multi-layered projects that blur the distinctions between dance and theater through an organic comingling of texts, choreography, immersive soundscapes, improvisation, indeterminate structures, and video. Laboratory Theater's non-didactic but radically political aesthetic challenges standard ideas of form and process, creating performances which place primary focus on the presence of the performer and his/her relationship with the audience.

Corey Dargel is a Texas-born, Brooklyn-based composer, singer, and actor whom The New Yorker magazine calls "a baroquely unclassifiable artist...at once uproarious and harrowing”. Dargel was nominated for Outstanding Solo Performance in the 2008 New York Innovative Theatre Awards, and his original music-theater work, Removable Parts, won the award for Outstanding Performance-Art Production. Dargel's theatrical song cycles have been presented by HERE Arts Center, The Public Theater's Under The Radar Festival, the Warhol Museum, Nautilus Music-Theater, and Performance Space 122. His third album, Someone Will Take Care of Me, was released in May of 2010 by New Amsterdam Records. Dargel has been a member of Laboratory Theater since its founding in 2001.

Oleg Dubson was born and raised in Minsk, Belarus, where he was a member of theater-studio Class-A! He moved to New York in 1998, studied filmmaking and continued his theatrical endeavors with the experimental troupe Science Project. Dubson has been part of Laboratory Theater since 2003. His latest short film, Self, was shown at the Berlin and Sarajevo Film Festivals.

William Smith is a composer and performer based in Brooklyn and began performing with Laboratory Theater in 2009. Incorporating electronics, theatrics, and improvisation, his work has been performed at venues across the US, recorded on New Amsterdam Records, and featured on WNYC radio shows “New Sounds” and “Spinning on Air.” In addition, Smith has performed on piano in Cynthia Hopkins’s This Clement World at St. Ann’s Warehouse, on Hammond B3 with Present Music in Milwaukee, and on keyboards with Corey Dargel in the American Composers Orchestra’s SONIC Festival. Smith is founder and curator of the critically acclaimed, Brooklyn-based new music series, "Music at First."

Artist Statement

The search for spiritual transcendence in a world of chaos and violence is an ongoing, primary theme of my work. I am interested in characters that live on the fringes of society, “outsiders” who struggle against ruthless societal structures and are forced to forge unique paths through their environments. My approach is similar, attempting to explore a space between forms, something—not quite dance, not quite theater—which combines intimate, personal, and socially relevant material with a formality and abstraction associated with choreography, to create a challenging, immersive experience for both audience and performer.

This past January, we performed the first 40 minutes of GENET PORNO in HERE’s 2013 CULTUREMART Festival for two packed houses. It offered us the opportunity to try out some production elements and polish the beginning of the piece. And...